1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an on-the-fly smart card reader.
2. Description of the Related Art
A smart card has a silicon chip embedded in it which may contain far greater amounts of information than the magnetic strips of current information bearing cards. The chips of these smart cards typically have eight input/output ports in the nature of contacts. One contact is to power up the chip and remainder are used for addressing memory locations in the chip and retrieving data from these memory locations. Current smart card readers have a slot into which a card is inserted until it hits a stop. When the card abuts the stop, the chip is aligned with a read head whose contacts mate with the contacts of the chip to power up the chip and commence reading from the chip.
The current method of reading smart cards is not adapted to handle a high throughput of cards. A high throughput may be required when, for example, sending out new cards to their owners.
This invention seeks to overcome drawbacks of known smart card readers.